The Effect of Violent Video Game Play, Arousal, and Personality on Sleep Quality

Abstract

Video games have become exponentially popular over the past few decades. Because they have become a societal staple, research has explored possible ways in which video games could affect one’s health. In particular, video games may impact sleep, leading to poor sleep quality (Adam, Snell, & Pendry, 2007), later sleep on-set (King et al., 2013), and increased daytime sleepiness (Van den Bulck, 2004b). Other factors, including type of video game, physiological arousal, personality, and game playing motivations may also affect overall sleep quality. In this study, 101 adult video game players wore a Fitbit for 48 hours and played console or PC video games as they normally would. A two-way ANOVA, a hierarchical regression, and correlation analyses were conducted and suggest some relationships may exist among these variables. Although some analyses were nonsignificant, that could suggest adults are not playing video games in such an unhealthy manner that their sleep quality is negatively affected. Future research could examine this further.